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How one woman launched the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, 50 years ago

 
The museum was designed by architect John Volk. According to Volk, “a museum should give a feeling of permanence and that is what I have tried to do with this building.” But this museum is not intimidating, it welcomes you inside both its exhibition galleries and intimate gardens and encourages you to stay. 
The museum was designed by architect John Volk. According to Volk, “a museum should give a feeling of permanence and that is what I have tried to do with this building.” But this museum is not intimidating, it welcomes you inside both its exhibition galleries and intimate gardens and encourages you to stay. 
Published Jan. 27, 2015

"Why not have an art museum in St. Petersburg?"

So mused a wealthy woman to herself sometime in the late 1950s.

And so began the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, which opened its doors Feb. 7, 1965. It transformed the cultural landscape of the city, becoming an institution that was so much more than it had to be, committed from the beginning to the high standards of major museums. It rallied a broad demographic to embrace it as a source of pride and pleasure.

The museum is marking its 50th anniversary with "Monet to Matisse — On the French Coast," an exhibition loaded with marquee names that opens with free admission on Saturday, the same date as that first opening. Wine Weekend: Cheers to 50 Years, with more marquee names but from the wine world (both vintners and wine labels), will contribute collective toasts to the occasion at a tasting, auction and dinner on Saturday and brunch on Sunday.

Margaret Acheson Stuart would be delighted.

Her story, intertwined with the museum's founding, has become something of a legend with attendant truths often exaggerated for drama.

Mrs. Stuart (1896-1980) was no parvenue when she decided to pursue this idea. St. Petersburg had been her primary residence for about 10 years as it had for other family members. They began visiting the area when she was a child. Her father, Edward Goodrich Acheson, had become wealthy as an inventor and was a colleague and friend of Thomas Edison, who had invited him to visit Edison's winter home in Fort Myers.

Mrs. Stuart was a shy, cultivated woman. Her greatest love was art and she was familiar with all the major museums in New York and Europe.

She didn't need a museum in St. Petersburg; she had the means to travel anywhere, anytime to visit one. But her love of St. Petersburg was such that she wanted to add a cultural resource that would provide the joy that art had always given her.

St. Petersburg was beginning to grow into more than a winter haven for elderly snowbirds. The city continued to chafe at comparisons to Tampa across the bay, with its bigger banks and corporate headquarters downtown. A cultural focus, which Tampa lacked, could raise St. Petersburg's profile. The city would soon revive a long-studied proposal to build an arena and performing arts theater, which became the Bayfront Center on the downtown waterfront at First Street and Fourth Avenue S. It also opened in 1965.

In 1961, Mrs. Stuart, then in her 60s, approached city officials with her proposal, pledging $150,000 toward construction costs, a $1 million endowment and at least $10,000 as an annual contribution for operating costs. It would be named the Museum of Fine Arts. Her name would not be attached to it because she wanted the community to feel a sense of ownership. And it would be free.

She asked the city to convey a 4-acre parcel of land at Beach Drive and Second Avenue NE, overlooking the waterfront. An old building on the site would be demolished.

She was thorough in her groundwork, lining up civic leaders and important business people in the community (mostly men, though she asked four women, which was a higher ratio than most boards had back then) to be the first trustees. She traveled to New York to copy the charter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, using it as a basis for the new museum. She retained patrician architect John Volk, who was often called the father of Palm Beach architecture for his elegant, classically inspired designs. Wives of prominent men were invited to join a women's auxiliary. It became known as the prestigious Stuart Society and remains a major source of volunteers and funds today.

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In June 1961, the city sold the land to the museum for $10. In May 1962, Rexford Stead became its director, though Stuart was still intensely involved in the project out of the spotlight.

But what would reside in the lovely building beginning to rise, its defining features a curved loggia and imposing Palladian facade? It would house a reference library, offices, a garden and gift shop. Most important would be its eight galleries. They needed filling.

Mrs. Stuart had begun to purchase art before Stead's tenure. Once he came into the mix, along with former Metropolitan Museum of Art official Horace Jayne, who was named advising curator, collecting efforts accelerated. Among the first significant purchases were two 19th century portraits by Samuel Waldo Lovett and a 19th century landscape by Thomas Moran. Still, the permanent collection was small and spotty, mostly prints and decorative objects.

A hilarious story published in the Times in 1964 recounted the flood of calls to the museum from locals who were sure the museum would want to purchase their "masterpieces." (Few offered to donate.) Jayne spent his days tearing around the city, chasing every lead, usually having to deliver the news, as tactfully as possible, that the art wasn't museum quality.

Mrs. Stuart was wealthy but didn't possess the deep pockets that could buy Big Deal Art. She did have friends with exceptional collections, and they provided long-term loans, such as landscapes by Claude Monet, for example, that remain among the most loved in the museum to this day.

The inaugural exhibition had to be spectacular and the museum's collection and local lenders didn't have enough star power.

Fortunately, the museum enjoyed the goodwill of the national arts community. Major institutions, impressed by its aspirations and wanting it to succeed, stepped forward, offering to send some of their treasures. Among them were the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery; and the National Gallery of Art. In all, 80 public and private lenders contributed almost 100 works valued at about $3 million, an extraordinary amount at that time. The names on the canvases flowed as a survey of Western art: Caravaggio, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Delacroix, El Greco, Bierstadt, Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse … the list went on.

More than $700,000 had been raised locally for construction of the $850,000, 30,000-square-foot building. By opening day, 2,500 individuals and families had purchased memberships even though admission was free to all.

Stead had secretly negotiated with representatives of the Duke of Devonshire for the loan of John Singer Sargent's gorgeous portrait of the Acheson sisters, ancestors of both the duke and Mrs. Stuart, as a surprise for her. It was shipped to St. Petersburg from Chatsworth, his grand country estate in England.

The opening on Feb. 7, 1965, was a triumph. An estimated 10,000 people came that first day. Later that month, Lady Bird Johnson, the first lady, visited St. Petersburg to promote VISTA, a social service program of her husband's administration. A highlight of her visit was a huge reception at the museum. Visitors continued to pour in. In its first three months, the museum reported attendance of about 90,000.

The glamorous opening exhibition left in less than a month.

It was many years before the Museum of Fine Arts had a show as stellar as that first one. Its collection grew steadily from a small inventory of several hundred works with the goal, set by Mrs. Stuart, of assembling a comprehensive one that represented all of human history.

The museum's first expansion was in 1974. An auditorium and a second garden had been in the original plans but were delayed due to costs. After her former husband's death — they had long been divorced — she sold Marly, the family estate on the Hudson River, and used proceeds to build the Marly Room and the Sculpture Garden. Three more expansions followed, the most recent and ambitious in 2008 being the $21.2 million Hazel Hough Wing on the north side of the museum, which increased its space to 85,000 square feet.

In 1980, during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Mrs. Stuart became ill. She did not recover. As was her wish, her ashes were interred in an unmarked spot in the Sculpture Garden.

Today the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg remains a cultural anchor in a community that is considered regional, spanning several cities and counties. It regularly has important exhibitions, many of them originating at the museum and some of them, in recent years, have been groundbreaking, receiving national attention. Its collection has grown to about 20,000 works of a quality that the museum can return the favor when it borrows from other institutions.

Its membership is about 3,000 households and annual attendance is about 100,000. Those numbers don't represent great gains since 1965. But after those early, dazzling years, membership and attendance dropped to much lower levels, especially after an admission fee was instituted in the 1980s. Too, there was little competition in the mid 1960s: no other art museums except the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, no major league sports teams, no malls. So current numbers seem robust.

Most of all, the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg will always represent the importance of visionary thinking. Much is made of St. Petersburg as an arts destination. Many can take credit for that: newer museums, galleries, organizations large and small, a growing population of professional artists. But it's fair to say that Margaret Acheson Stuart, the shy woman with equal measures charm, brilliance, resolve and, even more, with her museum that never bore her name, is a godmother to them all.

Times researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this report. Contact Lennie Bennett at lbennett@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8293.